Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition

“Our Bond of Peace: Patterns of Intercultural Exchange in the Carolina Piedmont, 1650–1750

“Our Bond of Peace” Patterns of Intercultural Exchange in the Carolina Piedmont, 1650–1750 james h. merrell Revisiting the Carolina Piedmont and “Our Bond of Peace” I must confess that it was at first somewhat disconcerting to be invited to revisit something I wrote more than two decades ago, published more than fifteen years past—and have scarcely looked at since. After all, when I first tried to work out the links in this “Bond of Peace,” I was fresh out of graduate school, with much yet to learn (even more than I still have to learn) about the historian’s craft. Moreover, I long ago left the Southern piedmont and its peoples, both literally and figuratively, as my interests led me to other frontiers and other folks.1 Meanwhile a wealth of fine scholarship has appeared—probing the piedmont, exploring exchange, and chronicling the entire colonial encounter. It seemed likely that this apprentice scholar’s long-ago attempt to stitch together the fabric of exchange in one corner of the colonial South would not stand the test of time.2 It was with some relief, then, that upon rereading “Our Bond of Peace” I found it less embarrassing, less dated, than I had feared it might be. The central argument still, in my view, delineates the overall pattern of exchange in that time and place. Native Americans were indeed actors in this drama; they did indeed, in the early going, set colonial men and colonial merchandise into existing structures of belief and behavior. Over time, however, the balance of power shifted from native to newcomer as piedmont peoples came to depend on regular supplies of foreign wares. I believe that this script still captures, with a fair degree of accuracy, the story’s plot. Even with two decades more scholarly experience, I would concur with my younger self that “the trade’s effects on piedmont societies remained more evolutionary than revolutionary.”    “our bond of peace” Recent scholarship generally supports this interpretation. One line of inquiry vigorously pursued over the past twenty years or so has been piedmont archaeology: native ways of life once only dimly visible have been much more thoroughly uncovered and brought to light. Those lifeways are in accord with the idea that piedmont peoples tended to be conservative in their engagement with a new world of wares. The archaeological evidence suggests that traditional habits of hunting, gathering, and farming endured long after European trade goods found their way into upcountry villages, as did the ancient skills of potters and fletchers. And although natives now might send their dead into the spirit world equipped with glass beads instead of sea shells, a brass kettle instead of a clay pot, a cloth coat instead of a deerskin cloak, and a musket instead of a bow, replacement of one item with another was not symptomatic of fundamental “changes in ritual and ideology.” Rather, archaeologists argue, “these changes are better interpreted as adaptive responses within societies that remained, in many respects, resistant to change and that attempted to maintain their traditional cultural systems.”3 Continuity and adaptability have also been watchwords of recent historical treatments of intercultural exchange in the colonial Southeast in particular and colonial North America in general. It turns out that natives well beyond the southern piedmont, experienced and adept in the art of swapping goods with foreigners long before Europeans arrived, continued to dictate trade’s terms. The neighboring Cherokees were “shrewd bargainers” in their dealings with colonists, observes Tom Hatley. “The life of the towns was changed but not revolutionized by the presence of traders and trade goods within them.”4 Among Creeks, too, Kathryn Braund notes, established “[n]ative customs and attitudes toward both trade goods and trading partners worked to shape the commercial relations they established with outsiders.” Moreover, Braund goes on, “Europeans were forced to respect— and often adopt—the . . . traditions of their Indian trade partners” in order “to meet Creek needs on Creek terms.”5 Scholars working on even larger canvases concur. Surveying the entire colonial South, James Axtell concludes that “[t]he great majority of these [European trade] items . . . were only pleasing or superior substitutes for functional native-made goods, and their traditional meanings and uses were largely retained.”6 Looking beyond the region to consider all of east-  james h. merrell ern North America, Daniel K. Richter finds that, while “expanded trade” eventually “reordered Native economies” and...